The National Guard is activated and the city and state police forces are nationalized. Sweeps of Hispanic neighborhoods round up all the Spanish-speaking people with brown skin and sort them out according to who has the right documentation.

Six million of them are found to be illegal immigrants.

They are loaded into buses, trucks, cattle cars and transported to the Mexican border. It’s all handled very humanely – they’re well fed on the way, and we pay the Mexican government a hundred dollars per returnee to pay for their return to their homes. That’s $600 million, but it’s so worth it.

So what is the result of our brave new no tolerance policy? (Emphasis mine)

And when it has all settled out, a new equilibrium is found. We didn’t just throw out the illegal immigrants, we threw out their jobs, too, and closed down all the businesses that served them.

The people who starved to death in Mexico aren’t here to enjoy the growing prosperity in their country, with so many American jobs now available to them – but free market economists never mind a few thousand deaths here and there. The free market always recovers. “Let them die,” the free market economists said, “and reduce the surplus population.”

Throw in a man on the street reaction:

As for all those Americans who had angrily rejected the idea of amnesty for illegal aliens, many of them were certain the right thing was done.

“If you reward them for breaking the law, they’ll just break it more,” they say.

“But you’re paying more for everything,” the reporter asks.

“Worth it,” they say.

“Why?”

“Because every illegal immigrant was a criminal!”

The reporter nods wisely. “So there’s no more crime now.”

“Well, no.”

“At least the worst criminals were gone. All the murderers, the thieves, the rapists, the child molesters, the drug dealers – they’re all gone, right?”

“Well, no. Some of them, but … look, we’re no longer subsidizing the education of their children! They’re no longer using public services without paying taxes!”

“Interesting,” says the reporter. “And yet poor Americans pay no income taxes, and they use the public schools without paying property taxes, either.”

“But their landlords pay property taxes.”

“But the landlords of the illegal immigrants paid property taxes. So I guess they weren’t being completely subsidized by the American people, after all.”

“And we aren’t having to pay for all those extra English-as-a-Second-Language classes, right?” goads the reporter.

“Absolutely right! Everything’s better! I can look around me and look at the people on the street and it feels like America again. Everybody’s talking English! Except for the orientals and the towel-heads, of course, but you’ve got to take things one step at a time.”

I think this about sums up the side of illegal immigration the Republicans don’t want us to talk about:

“Those are good laws! We don’t want the riff-raff of other countries!”

“But we weren’t getting the riff-raff, sir! We were getting the bravest, the hardest-working, the most determined to feed their families. We were getting the ones who scraped together the money to pay the illegal smugglers to get them across the border.”

And here is the brilliant closing (emphasis mine):

“What do you mean, until now?”

“Because it’s time to take down the Statue of Liberty, sir. We no longer accept the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. We no longer lift a lamp beside the golden door. The door is steel, and we’ve shut it tight. This isn’t America anymore.”

“That’s treasonous!”

“No, sir, you are the traitor. You’re the one who declared that America was no longer a nation built around an idea, which accepted all who embraced that idea. Now it’s just like any other nation on Earth. It stands for nothing except for holding on to what we’ve got and making sure there’s no room for the people most desperate to come and join us.”

“They didn’t want to live under our laws!”

“Yes they did. All we had to do was change a law that made far less sense than the traffic laws Americans break or bend all the time! If you make breathing a crime, then yes, all the breathers are criminals, but the people who made the laws are the stupid ones.”

“How dare you! We’re the ones who wanted to keep America American!”

“America is a nation that thrived because of a constant infusion of eager new citizens. You have closed the door against the best and bravest of them. You have cut off the lifeblood.”“At least we’re still speaking English!”

“That’s right,” says the fuzzy-headed liberal. “It takes a lot of brains and determination to learn to speak two languages fluently. We kicked out six million people who were willing to try to do that. And what we have left is … you.”

It proves a very salient point. For many Republican positions, actually implementing them leads to a horrible madness. Conservatism is about as effective in practice as Communism. It looks great on Heritage Foundation letterhead, but when put to the test it always shows its true color, the color of the Republican party: the color of blood.

Go on over and read the whole thing. This should be required reading for anyone diving into the immigration debate.

5 Responses

Let the National Guard do the dirty work for us this time. And mean who has the time to run around with torches, pitchforks and shotguns burning down shanty towns and such. Creating sundown towns that way is hard work.

Rafael, an excellent read.
TLB,
No he isn’t. He’s countering the racist bullshit that the illegal immigrants come here to mooch free services. No, they come here to work and feed their families. We are getting the workers, not the bums. His entire article is a point by point dismantling of the conservative position on immigration.

Can you respond to the crux of his argument? That removing illegal immigrants would, in practical application, end up hurting a lot of people, both illegal immigrants and citizens?

You seem to blame republicans yet they are the ones that created amnesty,to be fair they helped kill it too. The people that hire (entice) illegal immigration are they not guilty of something ? Or are they some type of humanitarian ? The US needs to be “better” than other countries by not protecting it’s borders ? The human saga of people coming to America and suffering a little as opposed to staying home and suffering a lot seems right. Use the door ! Stop sneaking in. Stop the coyotes from being the new slavers and stop the businesses that eagerly use illegals for their own gain yet fail to play fair re: taxes etc themselves.

in2thefray, the Republicans are kind of split, between the corporate neocons who favor amnesty and the nativist “core” Republicans who favor kicking everyone out.

I agree that we need to tackle business that exploit illegal immigrants. Further, I would not argue for opening the border entirely. But what Orson Card argues, quite effectively, is that the effect of going after every illegal immigrant is bound to have long reaching negative effects, both here and abroad.

So in addition to the notion of compassion, there is another very practical reason to oppose the rising tide of anti immigrant sentiment: We’d be hurting ourselves.